Jon Spencer, the BLUES EXPLOSION man who put the BELLBOTTOMS on BABY DRIVER! The Top Cat who spread the Secret Sauce in BOSS HOG! The Rockabilly Right‐Hook from Heavyweight Outlaws HEAVY TRASH! The Swank‐Fucking Master of PUSSY GALORE! Jon Spencer is back! Often imitated, never duplicated, the original NYC underground‐rock legend returns from the wilderness with twelve red‐hot hits, each more powerful than the last! This is Garage Punk for Now People! A wizard's brew of rhythm & blues and subversive dance grooves, weaponized with sci‐fi skronk and industrial attitude, calibrated for the Revolution, a ball‐peen hammer of sound guaranteed to destroy any post‐modern hangover! Pulsing with energy, clanging with excitement, and dripping with radioactive soul and raw emotion, Jon Spencer opens up his heart like never before, exploring man's modern condition with caustic guitars and outerworld crooning, asking and answering the musical question, "Is it possible to torch the cut‐throat world of fake news and pre‐fab, plastic‐coated teen ennui with the cold hard facts of rock'n'roll?" The answer is YES! SPENCER SINGS THE HITS! This is the truth serum America has been craving, the beginning of a rock'n'roll special counsel that takes no prisoners and puts the squares on ice!

This is Lamps’ third album and since the last one was called 'Lamps Lamps', they missed a hell of a chance to call this one 'Lamps Lamps Lamps'. Instead, they’d like to call it 'Under the Water Under the Ground', which implies a depth unimaginable by anyone but scientists. Do they get there? You bet. A look at the structural components of a rock trio reveals some hidden logic, resolved by concepts related to physics: if you plot three points (one per band member, if you want), and put the musical concepts of power, precision and melody into each of those slots, and you move the point where melody exists closer to the axis on which the other two points reside, you get something resembling an icepick. It’s still a triangle, but it’s long and wide, and its bottom angles are like knives. If they lived anywhere but Los Angeles (or Austin, or the nowhere in between), they might need a device that employs angles much like those to scrape the ice off their car windshields, or as a shiv. There are some catchy hooks here—some of the catchiest Lamps have written to date, and vastly improved by an industrial strength recording by Chris Woodhouse—but they compress that element of their sound into a dynamic that favors power and precision as its most acute points, amplified / distorted / corroded to the point where it only knows how to hurt. The rhythm section is straight-up gorilla goon shit; muscular surf beats by Josh Erkman and a leveling counterpoint on bass by Thee Jimmy Hole. And Mr. Montgomery Buckles’s formidable arsenal of effects strangle his guitar blue. Every song’s a winner, the sight and sound of some crowd surfer hitting the floor, one more punisher out of the frame.
— Doug Mosurock